Old Newspaper Image Restore

I got this old picture that I've been trying to restore that came from an old newspaper clipping back in the early 50's. It is the inside of an old teen joint that kids went to then. It was a friends mothers place. I've been trying to restore it, removing the halftone pattern and the inconsistent tone and also coloring it. I haven't had much luck in the removal of the halftone pattern...
Any recommendations? The following is a link to the image: http://jeffguayproductions.com/zooksnook.jpg

that's an interesting one. you might try one of the FFT filters, but i'm not sure. you could also try a median filter or polaroid's dust and scratch filter. i'm just taking these off the top of my head and havent tried on your image, so, you'll have to do a bit of hunt and peck. it will also depend on how good you want the final image to be. push come to shove you could always airbrush/paint. but definitely an interesting one.

May I also add my welcome to you. Ctein, (pronounced: kuh_TINE) in his book Digital Restoration From Start to Finish recommends the 3rd party filter Focus Magic. However, while it can be run as a Photoshop plugin, the feature used to remove the half-tone is only on the stand alone version. The other filters that he discusses are the: Dust and Scratches, Gaussian Blur, and Box blur.

I ran your picture through Focus Magic and then a little levels adjustment and High Pass sharpening in Photoshop CS3.

I ran the image through my FFT filter and ran into one thing I should have done at the start. This image is in grayscale and needs to be switched to RGB in order to use the Luminosity step near the end of the procedure.

Jeff, you sure do give us challenging images! I still use the old photo of your wife to test techniques and plugins - hope you don't mind. To de-screen this one I used Imagej, a public domain program produced by a researcher at NIH and available for almost all platforms. Since I use a Mac I don't have access to the usual FTP plugin. Imagej is a powerful program in its own right. In it, I ran Process>Smooth (maybe a couple of times - can't exactly remember) to minimize the screen dots, then Process>FFT>FFT. Masked out all but the central star, then ran Process>FFT>Inverse FFT. Saved the resulting image as a jpg, then pulled it into Photoshop CS3 where I ran Noise Ninja on it and, with a curve, increased contrast a bit. Not perfect, but the newspaper dots are pretty much gone, and the original tonality is pretty much intact.